I've been wondering about building counter ad technology. I think we recall their being some patents I saw sometime in the last handful of years that talked about swapping items out in a live show during reruns. But like why couldn't we just do that on our side and removing the items I assume we just pipe the HDMI in run some algorithms and then pipe it out. And I know I'm saying it as if it's trivial but if someone can write an algorithm to find existing things and swap them out it's the exact same thing except you just swap them out with a patch of the original scene for the original scene without whatever product placement I suppose.
I haven’t gotten to the “replace” bit yet, but I’m automatically muting live ads and auto skipping through recorded ones: https://github.com/michigandrew/the-clicker. Love your idea
I've done a bit of experimenting on OTA stuff (I use hdhomerun and had AI make me a DVR recently lol) and I think sometimes there is a fade to black that indicates start and end of ads, though the last thing I tried it on (Olympics) they didn't follow that very well, so I haven't revisited.
Also just the title of this post reminds me of ready player one (I just watched again recently), we can fill 80% of their field of view with ads before inducing seizures (I forget exact quote but it's close enough)
